First Internationalized Domain Names Near Completion

"The move towards a fully Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) system took a step forward today. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has announced the first four countries that have completed a key milestone in the IDN process -- an effort to expand domain names to support non-Latin alphabets.

"Arabic and Cyrillic are likely to be the first two character sets used through the initiative, with Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates now set to be the first countries with IDNs.

"All four have passed the language character (or string) evaluation as part of the IDN process that ICANN started at the end of 2009. String evaluation is an important step in the process for a number of reasons."

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